Use of Field Programmable Gate Array Technology in Future Space Avionics

Abstract

Fulfilling NASA's new vision for space exploration requires the development of sustainable, flexible and fault tolerant spacecraft control systems. The traditional development paradigm consists of the purchase or fabrication of hardware boards with fixed processor and/or Digital Signal Processing (DSP) components interconnected via a standardized bus system. This is foliowed by the purchase and/or development of software.

Color configuration method for an optically reconfigurable gate array

“…The first candidates are held programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). However, since FPGA configuration data are stored on SRAM, the circuit information for the FPGA is constantly damaged by highenergy charged particles [4]- [6]. For the reasons explained above, an error checking and correction method (ECC) [7] and triple-module redundancy (TMR) [8] [9] can be expected to be useful to detect and to repair the effects.…”

Flexible Matrix of Controllers for Real Time Parallel Control

“…FPGAs are frequently used in cryptography [28]. Also, applications in space vehicles find many opportunities from the point of view of computation and their speed using low clock frequencies [29,30]. The implementation of a numerical predictive control algorithm based on a linear model in the state space is discussed in the paper [31].…”

OLT(RE)2: An On-Line On-Demand Testing Approach for Permanent Radiation Effects in Reconfigurable Systems

“…On the other hand, today's commercial SRAM-based FPGA devices represent the most interesting technological platform for research projects that need high performance and low cost at the same time. Such devices provide a significantly larger amount of resources and they can be dynamically and partially reconfigured, thus allowing performance increase, energy efficiency improvement, and fault tolerance enhancement [6]. Moreover, such devices are significantly cheaper than radiation hardened ones.…”